Netcraft Toolbar released for Firefox

The Netcraft Toolbar has been released for Firefox. I just got the following email from Netcraft: We are pleased to announce the release of the Netcraft Toolbar for Firefox. You can download it from: http://toolbar.netcraft.com/install/ Note that you will be presented with a warning on the first attempt to download the software. You may have … Continue reading “Netcraft Toolbar released for Firefox”

The Netcraft Toolbar has been released for Firefox. I just got the following email from Netcraft:

We are pleased to announce the release of the Netcraft Toolbar for Firefox. You can download it from:

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/install/

Note that you will be presented with a warning on the first attempt to download the software. You may have to click the “Edit Options…” button that appears at the top of the page and add the site “toolbar.netcraft.com” to the list of allowed sites before you can install the toolbar.

We welcome your feedback and comments.

I’ve only had the toolbar installed for a couple of minutes, but I’ve already found a major problem — it doesn’t work with tabbed browsing at all. The toolbar always only shows information for the last page rendered in an active tab (but not pages rendered in the background in other inactive tabs). It doesn’t update when you switch tabs. Sometimes if tabs are loading in the background, it won’t load information for that tab at all, even when you switch to it. I’ve passed on these comments to Netcraft’s feedback address as well.

UPDATE: After playing around with this more, I’ve found that it actually breaks tabbed browsing in Firefox. When this toolbar is installed and you change tabs, the URI in the location bar does not update to that of the now active tab. It remains as whatever it was before the tab was changed. For now, this extension is definitely going on my not recommended list.

UPDATE 2: There is some conflicting information about whether or not this extension works correctly in Firefox 1.0.4. One of the commenters notes that it works for him, whereas another 1.0.4 user on Slashdot says that he seems the same behaviour as me.

UPDATE 3: Another commenter mentioned that it’s working for him in Firefox 1.0.4. I haven’t had a chance to test it myself, I’ve been swamped over the last couple of days, but I should probably give Netcraft the benefit of the doubt on this until (and if) more people chime in that it’s not working.

UPDATE 4: I had some time today, so I installed Firefox 1.0.4 and Netcraft Toolbar 1.0.1, the combination of which works perfectly fine. As far as I’m concerned, I think this is a great extension, and I highly recommend it to others who are considering using it. At the time of this update (2005-05-27 21:38 GMT +0800), it still has problems with latest-trunk Firefox builds, as I described in my original posting. I’m sure Netcraft will update their extension to be compatible with Firefox 1.1 prior to its release.

9 thoughts on “Netcraft Toolbar released for Firefox”

  1. You know, that status bar bug is in Firefox, not just the Netcraft toolbar. It’s been around for a long time, and for some reason hasn’t been fixed yet.

  2. I tested in a trunk nightly build.

    To the anonymous poster, I never mentioned anything about the status bar, I’m talking about the location bar up at the top of the screen. It seems to work fine without the extension installed, but breaks with it.

    If anyone out there has tested this on Firefox 1.0.4 and doesn’t have any of these problems I’m happy to update my blog post to that effect.

  3. It seems to be ok, installed on Firefox 1.0.4
    URI do update in location bar when changing tabs.
    Toolbar displays informations relative to active tab.
    [Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr-FR; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4]

  4. Works fine in Firefox 1.0.4
    I’ve downloaded the extension that lets me drag links to the “new tab” button. I did that and the toolbar worked fine. I could switch back and forth and the data changed appropriately. However, it could just be the pages that you visited or a corrupt download (?). Anyway, maybe tell me exactly what you did (in ChatZilla) and I can try to replicate it….

    ————–Rockerest

  5. I have installed Netcraft Toolbar in FFox 1.0.4 and experimented some problems whith popup windows: when I tried to vote on LXer (http://lxer.com/) or to popup-post to del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) no popup appeared and the browser seemed to be freezed. I had to launch FFox in safe-mode and uninstall the extension to see il behave in a normal way.

  6. Netcraft Toolbar 1.0.1 realeased.
    I’ve just installed it via auto-update, but I’ve haven’t found any changelog yet.

    Does it fix your problems with tabs and so on ?

  7. I had some time today, so I installed Firefox 1.0.4 and Netcraft Toolbar 1.0.1, the combination of which works perfectly fine. As far as I’m concerned, I think this is a great extension, and I highly recommend it to others who are considering using it.

    It still has problems with latest-trunk Firefox builds, as I described in my original posting. I’m sure Netcraft will update their extension to be compatible with Firefox 1.1 prior to its release.

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